George Colony's Blog: The Counterintuitive CEO

This blog, written by Forrester CEO George Colony, contains ideas, observations, and analyses to help drive the success of other CEOs. George’s goal is to assist today’s company leaders in forming unique approaches to the challenges they face.George’s bio | George on Twitter

Quickly: The only way CEOs can understand social technologies is by using them.

Content: I've got bad news for you. You can't understand Twitter, Facebook, or blogging by reading an article in a magazine or a report from your CMO. Sure, they can tell you what they are, but you won't be able to truly understand how they could change your business unless you actually use them.

Social is like sex. It's fun to talk about and read about, but you can't truly comprehend unless you do it.

While this blog spent its first year as a place of general conversation, I am changing it to focus on CEOs. I am the CEO of a small public company but I often spend time with big company CEOs – the leaders of the organizations that Forrester advises. This blog will contain ideas, research, observations, and analysis pointed at increasing the success of CEOs. It will identify what CEOs must accomplish to improve the prospects for their organizations and increase their own personal effectiveness. It will help CEOs take unique approaches to their challenges – hence “The Counterintuitive CEO.” This is in keeping with Forrester’s role focus – the company goes to market helping 19 roles attain high performance.

To keep all of this from becoming too sterile and boring, I will also include some personal observations -- recommendations for books, articles, music, things I love and things I hate. My intention is to share information that may make you think counterintuitively…or simply take the edge off.

While I am targeting CEOs, all are welcome here…and I ask all to join in on the conversation. Ping me when I’m off-base and please add ideas and information to push the discussion to a more valuable plane. I’m honored to have you participate.

Quickly: Give me your vote for the greatest American rock and roll band.

Content: A few years ago I went to an Aerosmith concert with two of my sons and some of my childhood friends. En-route, we argued about who was the greatest American rock and roll band.

There's rough consensus that the Brits dominate the overall list (The Who, Beatles, Stones, Zep, Cream, et. al.).But who would be at the top of the American list?

We had two rules: 1) You can't choose an individual, so that eliminates Dylan, Elvis, and arguably Jimi, and Bruce. 2) We tolerated a smattering of Canadians, so that keeps The Band and Crazy Horse in the running.

At Davos the big question was: "When are we going to get out of this economic mess?" So I decided to take an informal poll of attendees. The question I asked was: "When will world GDP start to increase again?" Strangely, the early poll results were quite negative -- the average was hovering in the mid-2011 range. But as the World Economic Forum wore on, there was creeping optimism -- I started to get more 2010s (and an occasional 2009) than 2011s. My sample cut across a wide swath, from CEOs to journalists to academics to political leaders -- 55 votes in total.

According to my unscientific Davos poll, world GDP will turn and begin to grow again in April of 2010.

Depressing? Not necessarily. Davos rarely gets it right. Remember, this was the group that was highly bullish only 12 short months ago.